In the morning I stood packed into the standing-room-only Dahlgren Chapel in the Georgetown University Quad. As a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., I had said most of my Masses as a young priest in this church, and this day's homily on the resurrection both consoled and inspired.

My afternoon was different.

That afternoon I zipped aong the Potomac on my bike, then settled into my chair to read a book on atheism, the best-selling Christopher Hitchens polemic, "god is not Great." To this writer, whatever grace I had imbibed that morning in what I took to be God's presence was a delusion.

Like most of us who have either held on or quit the Church, Hitchens attributes his enlightenment to his experiences with religion. Originally baptized an Anglican, his parents -- father brought up Baptist/Calvinist and his mother Jewish -- didn't care what he believed.

In his first marriage he became a Greek Orthodox to please his in-laws. In his second marriage the celebrant was a Reform Jewish rabbi. The Orthodox celebrant, he reports, was a fund raiser for Serbian mass murderers and the rabbi was a homosexual, who, according to Jewish law 2000 years ago, would have been stoned to death.

Therefore, Hitchens argues from page one, religion is bad and there is no God.

His "irreducible objections" to religious faith: It misrepresents the origin of the world, it makes us servile and suppresses sex, and it is grounded in "wish thinking."

If we yearn for mystery, wonder, and awe, we should turn not to religion, he says, but to literature -- to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, not to scripture. That Shakespeare and especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky turned to scripture for inspiration does not occur to him.

Chapter 2, "Religion Kills," enumerates the villains of history who were believers and also killers -- from the Crusades down to the Muslim terrorists spread out in four airplanes on 9/11 -- and attributes their blood lust to their religion. No word on super-murderers Hitler, Stalin and Mao who stamped out religion to make the state their god.

His chapter on the argument from design -- the intricacy of the watch or the human eye testifies that only a superior being, a creator, could have brought them into existence -- is more thought out; but today I doubt that many rely on the logic of the uncaused cause to sustain their faith.

Hitchens really foams at the mouth when he starts to sputter about the "nightmare" of the Old Testament, the seven-day creation myth, the genocidal massacres of the Israeli armies claiming the Promised Land, the Moses story which he has learned has no archeological foundation. That the Cain and Abel and the Joseph and his brothers stories are profound meditations on human violence and forgiveness has escaped him.

He knows nothing about contemporary scripture scholarship. He presumes that all believers reject evolution, and has never heard ot the scientists and theologians, like Teilhard deChardin, who have enriched their spirituality with evolutionary theory. Meanwhile, your basic Catholic high school or college student who has done his or her homework can distinguish between a scriptural literary form and the theological message which, often in a primitive way, it attempts to teach.

In short, angry Hitchens fires his blunderbuss at an enemy who has been gone for a generation.

Why do people believe in God? Partly because we were raised in believing families, and experience has taught us that belief has enriched our lives. Partly because we looked at the midnight sky on a clear night and did not ask who made the stars but felt His presence as a transcendent spirit. Partly because the lives of holy men and women are testimonies to belief. Partly because prayer helped put peace and order in our lives. But mostly because we have discovered the teachings of Jesus Christ and are convinced that what he says about love is true.

Hitchens, on the other hand, says in chapter 8 that "the New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the Old One." More on that next week.